LED tail lights

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seanjuan

seanjuan

Senior Member
on a local forum I was talking to people about retroing LED's in for your tail lights and one guy had done this allready and he just posted this video to show what it looks like

I thought it was pretty cool and I will probably do this at some point this winter

LED tail light vid
 
They DO burn out. Just not as quickly as incandescant bulbs. They're not necessarily brighter, but they DO have higher intensity. Don't confuse intensity with brightness.
 
Oh man I just opened the video... he used those crappy bulb replacement units. There aren't any on the market that actually put out more light than the stock bulbs, unless you pay $50 a pop for the ones that LEDTronics sells. The cheapo replacements you find at AutoZone and Rice Boys are total pieces of crap. Trust me- I did my tails with LEDs like this almost two years ago, and they were super dim (but looked bright because of the higher intensity)- and the individial LEDs started burning out in a matter of weeks. If you're going to convert to LEDs, do it the right way.

:)
 
me so stupid....what's the difference between intensity and brightness??
 
It looks super dim. They did this in a pitch black room and the lights looked kinda washed. Just imagine how that would look in the sun.

The caddie deville has them, however, they use alot more then 15-20 LED's. To get the same discharge out of a LED style bulb in tail light housing made for conventional, you have to wire them up more then just a flat top. This way you only have a few degrees of a light beem, and conventional headlight housings (parabolas) use the light bulb that spits the light out in all directions, then focuses it into a beam. To get that effect with a LED, you would have to wire up to a hundred, all facing diffrent angles, to form almost a sphere. The cost to do this is insanely expensive because each LED is like a wire, and must be sordered into its source. This makes a bulb like that cost 200x more expensive. They make bulbs to fit in your normal house fixtures made out of hundreds of LEDs all grouped into a design of a normal 60w bulb. The LED bulb cost 200. True, they produce almost no heat, last 10 times longer, and take a tenth the power to run as a normal 60w bulb, however, with how extensive the manufacturing is, the cost does not make the product that entising.
 
Originally posted by Calesta+Nov 12 2003, 07:22 PM-->
Calesta @ Nov 12 2003 said:
Oh man I just opened the video... he used those crappy bulb replacement units. There aren't any on the market that actually put out more light than the stock bulbs, unless you pay $50 a pop for the ones that LEDTronics sells. The cheapo replacements you find at AutoZone and Rice Boys are total pieces of crap. Trust me- I did my tails with LEDs like this almost two years ago, and they were super dim (but looked bright because of the higher intensity)- and the individial LEDs started burning out in a matter of weeks. If you're going to convert to LEDs, do it the right way.

:)
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they weren't the cheapo ones but they also weren't the ones from LEDtronics, he said it spent about $15 bucks per bulb and that they still are just as bright as normal bulbs in the daylight

asmallsol
and conventional headlight housings (parabolas) use the light bulb that spits the light out in all directions
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that's true but he is only using the LED's in the tail lights which are not projection lights but signal lights and do not need to "spit light out in all directions" a signal light only needs to light up and be visable in all conditions. if you look at alot of new traffic lights you will see that they are being made out of LED's not as well

think about the factory spoilers that have the LED strip in them... next time you are behind a car that has that in traffic pay attention when he hits his breaks and see which brake light comes on first... and which one you notice more. The LED spoiler will be at full intensity before the incandesant bulbs are even warmed up and is bright enough to be seen even in daylight

so as long as you understand how light works and you can find LEDs that can match the brightness or candlepower of an incandessant bulb then I'd go for it because IMO LEDs are much better for signals lights and will actually make your car more safe because it will give the person behind you a fraction of a second more to react and apply his brakes and that might be just enough to prevent a collision
 
LED= :thumbsup:. I Love LED. I put them on my turn signals for my civic and they work great. I got adjustable blinkers and when i put the LED lights they went even faster and now i have the fatest blinkers ever...if i want. I could go slow, then fast and slow again and whatever speed i want. If i had a digital video camera or something like that i would show the world but i cant. The fastest ive seen before that was 12x (dont know what that means) but when you take out a bulb and the blinkers are fast then that speed is usually 4x. I would kick 12x's ass! My friend had a 12x blinker relay and i killed his in speed. They only complaint i have about LED is that it is not too visable in the day time. The notice-able difference between LED and regular bulbs is that it is instant on/off as where the regular bulbs slowly get bright and slowly get dim. Look at the video, it is instant.
 
Originally posted by seanjuan@Nov 13 2003, 12:13 PM
they weren't the cheapo ones but they also weren't the ones from LEDtronics, he said it spent about $15 bucks per bulb and that they still are just as bright as normal bulbs in the daylight
Click to expand...

Trust me- $15 each is the cheapo price. You can get them cheaper than that, but the ones I played with (several brands) were all in the $15 price range. I've looked around at most of the ones available on the market for that amount of cash, and they're all about the same. My next major taillight mod will look like the Cadillac tails, but they'll be even brighter and even more intense.
 
Originally posted by spectacle@Nov 12 2003, 09:10 PM
me so stupid....what's the difference between intensity and brightness??
Click to expand...

Think of intensity like a cymbal crash in a stream of music, while brightness is the overall volume of that music. You can have really intense light that stands out at one single point (like his tails) or have something truly useful that is brighter overall than the stock setup.

Example- the sun is a high intensity point in the overall brightness of the sky. Kinda get it? I'm not in too much of an explanatory mood right now.
 
Originally posted by Calesta+Nov 13 2003, 05:21 PM-->
Calesta @ Nov 13 2003 said:
seanjuan
Click to expand...
Calesta @ Nov 13 2003 said:
@Nov 13 2003, 12:13 PM
they weren't the cheapo ones but they also weren't the ones from LEDtronics, he said it spent about $15 bucks per bulb and that they still are just as bright as normal bulbs in the daylight
Click to expand...

Trust me- $15 each is the cheapo price. You can get them cheaper than that, but the ones I played with (several brands) were all in the $15 price range. I've looked around at most of the ones available on the market for that amount of cash, and they're all about the same. My next major taillight mod will look like the Cadillac tails, but they'll be even brighter and even more intense.
Click to expand...

I agree with you that his setup is not the best, and I wasn't really trying to say that it was. what I like about LED's is the instant on/instant off capability

at first when the guy posted about his setup I was under the impression that he had custom made it and not just bought some mass produced bulb replacements

what I would like to do with my tails is to open them up and put a ring of LED's around the outer edges of the lights so that the original bulb is still there but with a ring of intense instant light around it.... essentially highlighting the stock bulb and providing that extra split second of warning to someone that I'm on the brakes

because we all know that nobody enjoys getting rear ended :blink:
 
Yeah, I thought it was about a custom job- not just dumb replacement bulbs. I'm going custom and filling the whole housing with LEDs so it looks like the Deville... but it's not going to be cheap.
 
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